Learning Lean-Agile Flow Through Games

Lean-agile concepts can be easily misunderstood and sometimes a good exercise can help solidify the ideas. Attendees will learn about flow, bottlenecks, local versus whole system optimization, and delivery of value by participating in a series of small group exercises. The exercise is a modified version of the Scrum Penny Game and will help them understand how visualizing work, managing flow, and prioritizing value can improve any system, but especially their Scrum and Kanban-style implementations.

Learning Outcome

Attendees will understand the core concepts for lean-agile thinking. They'll also learn the benefits of optimizing the whole system (not just local optimization), how to identify and resolve bottlenecks in their workflows, and the benefits of prioritizing customer value in order to maximize their delivery value.

schedule 8 months ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Our roadmaps and backlogs are usually littered with pet projects, squeaky wheels, and recent ad hoc items that gain priority simply because they are the latest shot across our bow. Impact mapping is a powerful practice that helps us identify and align our work to the most valuable business goals and mission objectives and avoid many of the common challenges that arise from an unfocused set of work priorities.

Impact maps help us visualize quantifiable benefits that deliverables should produce towards our business objectives. They allow us to focus our work on those deliverables that move the needle the most, not just deliver features. The practice is a great way to communicate assumptions, create plans, and align stakeholders as well as aid in strategic planning, roadmap management, and defining measures of success and quality.

This workshop will provide an appreciation for the power of impact mapping by walking you through building your own impact maps and the facilitation process for doing so in your own organization. You will leave the workshop having participated in a tangible example of the technique, and having gained an understanding of best-practices for facilitation with a focus on an impact map’s outputs and how they lead into the creation of actionable user stories when completed. Hands-on collaboration with your fellow attendees will help encourage your own application of this technique in your real world road-mapping and backlog refinement activities.

Mathias Eifert - Agile Essentialism – Getting past rule-based Agile

schedule 6 months ago

45 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Are you sometimes overwhelmed by the never-ending stream of Agile teachings you’re supposed to know and have at your fingertips to address every possible situation in the proper Agile way?

Sure, Agile is a “mindset” and you’re supposed to “own your process” but the reality is, that’s not how we teach or learn or usually even talk about Agile. Instead, we are bombarded with ever more retro formats, technical practices, prioritization techniques, facilitation tips, and other snippets of wisdom that we should all know before we can be considered good Agilists. And if your job title is Scrum Master or Agile Coach, the range of things you’re expected to master only expands.

In this session, Mathias Eifert will share how he found his footing in a vast sea of loosely connected Agile rules, processes, techniques and tools by recognizing that a small number of fundamental concepts can help with finding answers that are “good enough” as a starting point to tackle most new contexts or problems. Together, we will examine how many established Agile approaches can be traced back to these essential concepts and hopefully help each attendee a little further along on their journey from rules-based Agile to fundamental understanding.

Jess Long - Kaizen Land - Gamifying Stand Up and Overcoming Anti Patterns

schedule 8 months ago

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45 Mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

Learn how the gingerbread men are taking over the daily Stand Up and forever changing the mornings of teams everywhere.

Have your Daily Stand-Ups become stale? We’ll talk through the evolution of an idea that ended up demolishing monotony, obliterating anti-patterns and spawning smiles… and to think, it all started when my daughter and I were playing Candy Land!

We’ll talk through the implementation of a game board during one team’s stand up through the infectious adoption and evolution of its existence. You’ll hear how teams tackled some of their greatest impediments and helped build a zone of psychological safety all while having fun.

By the end of this session, you’ll be prepared to bring this back to your team and create your own success stories.

Jess Long - Empowering Performance Through Servant Leadership

schedule 8 months ago

45 Mins

Tutorial

Intermediate

This session is focused around leading your teammates toward success over managing them off a cliff.

Most of us who have had the pleasure of coaching a scrum team have adopted the mindset of servant leadership. But what about directors and middle management?!

Do you have teammates reporting to you who work on Scrum teams that you’re not part of?

Do you report to a manager that might as well be on another planet?

If you answered YES to either of these questions, this session is for you. We’ll talk through the shift of leading over managing and how we can use the framework of the retrospective as a tool to bridge gaps, manage performance and promote transparency. Whether you’re in a position of leadership or individual contribution, the values and mechanisms we review can be brought back to your organization.